Another new person

Hello all, I was directed here from the Talkbass forums and I'm looking forward to learning some more about bass tremolos here. I'm a fairly recent convert to bass trems, having built a bass that uses a kahler this past January. Here's a few pics of the bass:

As everyone here will tell you, I am usually concerned about basses with trems that have extreme string angle at the headstock, and I noticed that your bass has all four strings going off at odd angles. Do you have any tuning stability issues with this bass?

Tuning is a minimal issue, when I bend the strings sharp they stay a tiny bit sharp, but when I dump the bar they return perfectly in tune. I mostly bend the pitch flat anyway (took me a while to figure out that bending up too much results in a lot of broken G strings (that's what she said)). The stability may have something to do with the sperzel locking tuners I'm using (never again in the future, the ratio is terrible). I plan to replace the bone nut with a graphite one eventually to hopefully eliminate all problems.

Chowderboots, I play a lot of different music with it but I made it with classic/progressive rock in mind. The pickups are TV Jones Thunder'trons, and to be honest I only picked those because out of all the pickups my school let us choose for a first build they were the only ones that didn't look like they were designed by Leo Fender (I love Fenders, but I didn't want this to be one). Turns out that they sound pretty good; the bridge is nice and bright, but not ear-splittingly so, and the neck pickup is deep without being overwhelming (actually, the neck pickup has a good Black Sabbath kind of tone).

The teachers had a list of brands that we could order from (supposedly to assure quality products, but I suspect to make a little profit of their own with discounts and such ). The brand list was pretty short; EMG and Seymour Duncan were the biggest two. For whatever reason they said I couldn't use Ric replacement pickups, so I ended up with the Jones (probably for the better).